Updates from October, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 18:31 on 2025-10-28 Permalink | Reply  

    Wendy Devera, who conspired with the late Stephan Probst to rape a woman that had been drugged, was sentenced to two years of house arrest Monday.

    As told here in La Presse, the judge – a woman – seems to have bought the story that Devera would never have done such a thing without Probst’s encouragement, and is never likely to do such a thing again. Note the headline spin of “dans un penthouse”.

    Wednesday morning there’s further news alleging Probst hid his assets before suiciding. Other victims are suing his estate.

     

    • jeather 18:55 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      Shades of Homolka reasoning.

    • Kate 19:00 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      I was thinking that. With overtones of Ghislaine Maxwell.

    • jeather 10:28 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      She might have never done it without his encouragement, I guess, but most people wouldn’t do it even with encouragement. (Based on things I’ve heard, I don’t think the encouragement went the other way.)

  • Kate 17:48 on 2025-10-28 Permalink | Reply  

    I commented earlier that I wasn’t on the federal dental plan because my dentist practice had told me they were not on it.

    My information was out of date, and I wanted to note it separately. Anyone who qualifies according to the fairly broad criteria can sign on, and your dental practice will treat it the same way they do private insurance.

     

    • MarcG 07:31 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      Can you retroactively apply it to your last visit?

    • Kate 15:18 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      I didn’t see any mention of that, MarcG.

    • MarcG 17:12 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      I would ask. It’s surprising what’s possible but not offered.

  • Kate 17:20 on 2025-10-28 Permalink | Reply  

    Linda Gyulai at the Gazette looks into cases of apparent roadwork inefficiency: the Christophe‑Colomb bike path that the headline says was rebuilt twice, and the REV on Jean‑Talon East which is going to have to be dug up again later to replace a water main from 1911.

    Seems like both of these have reasons which may not be apparent to the casual observer.

     

    • DeWolf 19:30 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      Fair enough for the work on Jean-Talon which is poorly planned in so many ways.

      But for Christophe-Colomb, I don’t get the problem. There wasn’t any real construction in 2023. The bike path at that point consisted of painted lines and plastic bollards.

      The work now being done between Jarry and Jean-Talon is a complete reconstruction of the street which means all the underground infrastructure has been replaced and the raised bike paths will be there for many years to come. (It’s really nicely done, by the way — if you go there, notice how the drains run underneath the bike path from the road to landscaped saillies drainantes.)

      For the rest of the street, it’s an upgrade, not a duplication of work. The bike path was brought up to standard with island bus stops and concrete medians at intersections, similar to what was done on St-Denis in 2020. It’s a fairly light, surface-level intervention — officially a “transitory” arrangement until the street is fully rebuilt, which won’t happen for quite a few years from now.

    • dhomas 08:34 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      Am I the only one who preferred when the Christophe-Colomb bike path was between the trees, away from the street (North of the Met)? I never quite understood why it needed to be redone in the first place.

    • dhomas 09:06 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      Forgot the links. The path used to be here:
      https://maps.app.goo.gl/BrT43RgezgypyQWU6
      Now it’s in the street:
      https://maps.app.goo.gl/WmQoyhqPwRjqvZoL8

    • Kate 10:24 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      When I was last cycling, I used to do that off-road route alongside Christophe‑Colomb from time to time. It was pleasant and I’m sorry to hear it’s been abolished.

    • DeWolf 12:23 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      @dhomas That main problem with that 700m section of path is that the intersections were very unsafe. It was the same situation as the Notre-Dame path where a woman was recently run over by a truck. Fine for a leisure ride but not great for actually getting places.

      Last time I passed by in the summer, the old path is still there, so you can still use it if you want.

  • Kate 14:40 on 2025-10-28 Permalink | Reply  

    With two weeks to go before the REM adds the 14 new stations of its Deux‑Montagnes branch, management is optimistic about avoiding breakdowns and, besides, as one of the cited officials says, in the case of stoppage there are many alternative means of transport available, unlike the trip from Central Station to Brossard.

    But… the strikes at the STM could deprive the REM of its belt‑and‑suspenders plans.

     

    • Nicholas 15:56 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      Are there many alternative means of transport? Between Two Mountains, western Laval and Pierrefonds there is no bridge except for this rail bridge, so you have to make a huge detour, and there are no direct buses. And if it were true, why are we building this, and why did so many people complain when the commuter line the REM is replacing go away for five years?

      As an example, I have a friend taking a trip from Bois-Franc to Roxboro on Friday. Back in the day, and in a few weeks, it’s a five minute trip. This weekend it’s over an hour at minimum.

      If your only thought is how to get downtown, then yes, there are other options, though they’re not great. For anything else….

    • Kate 17:45 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      They do seem to be being a bit hand-wavy about this. Are they assuming most passengers will be staying on the island of Montreal?

      I haven’t taken a REM yet and am sort of looking forward to trying out the elevators at Édouard‑Montpetit…

    • DisgruntledGoat 00:59 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      Huge REM fan formerly accused of astroturfing and I hope it works out for all, RIP REM de l’est killed by NIMBYs

    • Uatu 09:25 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      Good luck folks! REM user here who waited in the rain, snow, slush, -20c for shuttle buses and had my paycheck docked for being late when it broke down. Hopefully it’ll all work out better for you….. Bahahahah…. ahem. I mean, let’s go REM! Lol

    • Kate 10:26 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      DisgruntledGoat: There were a lot of strikes against the route proposed for the REM de l’Est, and the criticism didn’t only come from people whose back yards were involved.

    • Joey 14:45 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      If the NIMBYs did indeed kill the REM de l’Est, they just got a jump on the massive price tag, which would’ve killed it sooner or later.

  • Kate 09:05 on 2025-10-28 Permalink | Reply  

    Both Projet and Ensemble have heard complaints about difficulties in voting at the advance polls on Sunday, and are urging Elections Montreal to do better.

     

    • Joey 11:23 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      According to a ChatGPT search, the participation rate in advance polling grew from 4.9% in 2013 to 5.6% in 2017 to 13% in 2021 (COVID outlier?) and apparently levelled off at 9% this year. While I’m sympathetic to those who had to wait in long lines and have personally voted early usually do to convenience (i.e., advance polls closer to home, harder to squeeze in voting on election day), there’s a small part of me that thinks that voting not on election day should really be an exception for those who require it. This campaign has been pretty lacklustre, but it’s not inconceivable that something significant will happen between October 26 and November 3. I guess this is a problem that will solve itself if we ever adopt online voting.

    • Nicholas 12:05 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      Any better will have to be in 2029. There will already be 4-6x staff on election day, because advance polls amalgamate 4-6 regular polls. So unless you assume turnout next Sunday will be 40%+, lines will be shorter. And it takes a huge amount of work to make last minute changes.

      People are voting more in advance polls; federal elections have 48 hours of it and this past April polls were packed all long weekend. Municipals have 8 hours. The province may decide to add a few hours or add another day. But one thing everyone could do is report wait times. I went to vote at 10 to 8 on Sunday and there was one other voter in the whole school. Busy afternoon, quiet evening. Wouldn’t it be great if you could go to a website and see live wait times?

    • EmilyG 12:23 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      ChatGPT is not a reliable source. It tends to make things up when it doesn’t know an answer.

    • MarcG 12:35 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      Yeah it’s terrible. This CBC article from 2017 says there was a 6.5% turnout for advanced voting that year, and this Global article from 2013 has it at 5.58%. I couldn’t find any news sources for the 2021 number.

    • Joey 14:10 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      I checked the numbers – they come from the following city document: https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/prt_vdm_fr/media/documents/20240430_mem_vdm_pl57-loi_visant_proteg_elus_fav_exer_sans_entraves.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

      I would be surprised if they were inaccurate. I assume the initial numbers reported by media outlets may have been revised after the fact. Not sure that ChatGPT’s output is “terrible” in this case… and unlike the news stories, it provides sources that you can verify.

    • MarcG 14:55 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      The problem is that sometimes it straight-up invents things, so you have to verify everything it spits out, which for me nullifies any time-saving or ease-production, and actually makes the experience of research frustrating because your assistant is a liar. Add in the fact that most people don’t fact check it and you’ve got yourself a big problem.

    • Nicholas 16:02 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      I will give Joey one point: journalists are awful at linking to documents they cite. Part of that is it’s often hard to upload documents to their journalist website, part of that is not to give other journalists a scoop, part of that is the more links they give the quicker you click away. But most of it is just bad, lazy practice, and sometimes it’s journalists don’t think their readers care about reading the source documents (which, to be fair, isn’t entirely wrong).

    • Kate 17:56 on 2025-10-28 Permalink

      Joey, CTV reported at 18:45 Sunday that 5 percent of voters had voted, but when everything was added up at the end of the day, the estimate came to 9.3%.

      Throughout an election day, the person in charge of the polling place checks in with your table from time to time to note down the number of voters, and these numbers tend to be given out to the media a tad prematurely.

    • Joey 14:48 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      I find LLMs are great as assistants and not oracles – they can conduct web searches much more quickly than humans, but they don’t surface correct answers consistently to just accept results beyond fairly straightforward questions, like someone’s birthdate. The ChatGPT UI makes it very easy to at least follow the links to its sources, though occasionally you have to dig around. IOW, if you treat ChatGPT and other LLMs as an enthusiastic-but-clueless research assistant, you’ll avoid most of the common AI errors.

    • MarcG 14:58 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      Something that comparing Joey’s AI results with my “human” research revealed to me is that the robots can search through multilingual resources, which is interesting and useful.

    • DeWolf 17:46 on 2025-10-29 Permalink

      Yes, and on top of its multilingual capabilities, it can dive deep into anything that is publicly accessible but might not be immediately obvious or available to anyone without superhero research capabilities. AI is a very useful tool, but it’s just that — a tool. We need more education about how to use it and why. At the moment it seems we’re stuck in a useless “AI good or bad?” kind of debate.

    • Ian 07:49 on 2025-10-30 Permalink

      Be sure you double and triple check anything an LLM presents as facts. Remember, it’s all just linear algebra so it is mathematically inevitable that it will throw unpredictable errors.

      A few days back I saw that somebody else hat gotten a totally wrong result from Google’s AI summary, so I checked myself, and they have since corrected it, but… according to the AI (at the time) the ideal internal temperature for a beehive is 3435°C. Note that 1084°C is the melting temperature of copper.

      “Brood-rearing area
      Ideal temperature:
      3435°C (9495°F)”

      Pretty sure the LLM just stripped out the en dash but that’s uh… not good.

      Click here to sewe the screen capture:

      https://mstdn.social/@ianrogers/115462938349797125

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